Lance Wicks BSc (Hons) Kiwi, Judoka, Geek, Husband Daddy!

Change is a good thing… right?

So…. where to start.The last time I blogged (back in April) I wrote that I was changing from the PHP based web application team back to the Perl based test automation tools team. Well… since then the company I was at made some more changes and the Perl team was directed down a path to merge with some C tools of a similar type to the Perl ones.

There were some other large changes in management (direct and above) and the big picture is that both my immediate manager and then later I decided to move on from the company.

I handed in my notice and decided to look in other directions (more on that later). So the end of July marked the end of that adventure and August is the start of another period of change for me.

August is a fun month for me as I shall be in the USA and Brazil with the IJF IT team for most of it. I will be working to help stream live video (via Youtube) of the World Cadet and World Senior championships. Of course I'll be helping with the electronic scoreboard system and will be running my NodeJS based live tweeting software also ( http://twitter.com/judoticker ).

So why move on?Lots of people have asked why I am moving on from my current $dayjob. And like all decisons of this sort it is not a simple decision. A big part of the decision was that my immediate manager moved on, he acted as the "Product Owner" for our scrum team and was also the champion of scrum in the company.

So his departing left a big hole, one a non scrum manager stepped into and tried to fill. But sadly the manager was a "scrum but" practitioner and after some very heated attempts at resolving it I "inspected" and the result is my leaving (adapting). Although my temptation and initial reaction was to stay and fight the system; I realised that as AnnMarie De Mars put it, there is a level of futility to doing so. Even if you win you lose as you feel all the pain to get very little reward.

Equally, the technical direction was going the wrong way. Many of our technical improvements were being undone and the work the team was being directed towards were not aligned with my personal direction. In other words, I am a Perl developer who took the role to sharpen my Perl skills and work in an agile environment. Sadly, the company was/is unable to go that direction so I decided that I wanted to grow further. So I'm looking forwards and looking for agile Perl roles, where I hopefully can continue to sharpen my Perl skills and also contribute by sharing the high quality of Agile/scrum with a new team and drive some technical practises in a new environment. Thats the plan at least… lets see what comes about.

Looking out there I am pleased to see the job market is healthy, literally within hours of posting my CV online I was receiving calls. What was of interest too was that there are some good Perl jobs on offer out there. And not just in London. There are Perl jobs all across my part of the south coast of England and up the M3 to London.

So that is really positive!

So the next time I post hopefully I'll be able to share some good news on having found an exciting new challenge!